Research brief: Successful science outreach with social media

Over four years, the Norwegian Polar Institute’s (NPI) Ocean and Sea Ice team used the social media handle @oceanseaicenpi across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to communicate its research to peers and the public. The impact of this social media outreach has now been reported in the journal Oceanography (pdf).

The team’s social media accounts gained 7000 followers over four years across all three platforms, which enabled the researchers to raise public awareness of their science. There were also indications that this social media profile increased reads and citations of publications among their peers.

Through this experience, the researchers gained an insight into the benefits of using social media for science outreach and developed a number of tips to help other research groups and individual researchers enjoy the same success. Tips include how to write posts, how small teams can run social media networks and taking advantage of analytics to boost reach. There are also many examples of posts that work for readers to study.